A Meeting Of The Metal Minds

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Oct 30, 2009

ORLANDO, Fla — Robots vacuum our homes, search for landmines, perform surgery, and explore Mars. They've been taught to dance, play chess, arm wrestle, and ballroom dance. For all of this service and goodwill toward men, robots deserve credit, but fictional and cinematic slams are the norm. You know the plot: Machines rebel, humanity is enslaved, and Asimov rolls in his grave.

One hears of no such silliness at the 2006 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), held this week at the Walt Disneyworld Hilton in Orlando, Florida. One of the largest conferences of its type, ICRA attracts more than a thousand leading roboticists from North America, Europe, Japan, Japan, and Japan. This year's theme is "Humanitarian Robotics." If you're willing to brave presentations with titles such as "Force Tracking Control for Constrained Robot with Uncertainties"—and can stomach industrial-grade linear algebra before you've finished your morning coffee—this is the place for learning the latest on robotics. ICRA draws the scientists, programmers, and engineers who really have their heads under the hoods. Or torsos. Or . . . you get the idea.

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Tuesday featured a group of talks on humanoid robots. Now it's true, some of these are the very ones spreading robo-paranoia—witness Repliee Q1, an android that even its creator describes as "creepy." The ones discussed at ICRA, however, demonstrated a purpose beyond entertainment or shock. Ikuo Mizuuchi, a roboticist at Japan's Waseda University, believes that humanoid robots have strong potential for work in education, medicine, household help, search and rescue, and entertainment. Humans will relate to, and work more naturally with, robots that resemble people, Mizuuchi theorizes, and the creation of WABIAN-2 by the Takanishi Laboratory at Waseda University. It looks a little like a Star Wars Stormtrooper and has a featureless face, but the robot, which can walk with a reasonably natural gait and bow its head in greeting, still manages to look almost friendly.

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A primary role of these lifelike robots is not to advance human mimicry but rather human understanding. Scientists formulate theories about how various systems of the human body work, and roboticists believe that some of these theories can be verified or rejected by building robots. The robot iCub, which is being developed by a partnership of European researchers, resembles a two-year-old child and will be programmed to test various neuroscientific theories on, say, how the brain controls eye movement or directs the coordinated limb movements that produce crawling. Back at Waseda University, engineers have built a robot to test ideas about how humans produce speech. Their Anthropomorphic Talking Robot is taciturn—it does little more than articulate the vowels—but it accomplishes this with mechanical lungs, vocal cords, tongue, and lips.

Not everybody runs from negative robot stereotypes. Kouki Hayashi, a scientist at NTT DoCoMo, Inc., presented his team's work on the W-1 Shape-Shifting Face Robot, which has 52 points of movement on its silicone face to convey emotion, presence, and naturalness. Hayashi cited one of the best bad movie 'bots ever as his inspiration. "We developed the face-shifting version of the Terminator T-1000," he said. —James Vlahos

Speak, metal one: Waseda Talker No. 5. is not alive. Photo is courtesy of Waseda University

There's a thin line between comforting and creepy when it comes to putting a face on robots. The Shape-Shifting Face Robot WD-1. Photo Courtesy of the NTT DoCoMo Multimedia Laboratories and Waseda University.

The shape-shifting face of the modern robot head. Eeeek! The Shape-Shifting Face Robot WD-1. Photo Courtesy of the NTT DoCoMo Multimedia Laboratories and Waseda University.